Darrell Doucette didn’t play NCAA football.
He never played in the NFL.
But the 35-year-old New Orleans native thinks he’s a better player than Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes, a three-time Super Bowl champion and MVP.
In flag football, that is.
“I feel like I’m better than Patrick Mahomes because of my IQ of the game,” the quarterback of the world champion U.S. flag football team told TMZ. “I know he’s right now the best in the [NFL], I know he’s more accurate, I know he has all these intangibles. But when it comes to flag football, I feel like I know more than him.”
In an interview published by the Guardian last week, Doucette said he feels it’s “disrespectful” to the flag football community to “automatically assume” that NFL players will be the ones to represent the U.S. when the sport makes its Olympic debut at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
Doucette and his U.S. teammates are set to defend their title at the 2024 International Federation of American Football Flag Football World Championships next week in Lahti, Finland. Before that, however, the quarterback, known as “Housh” (for his resemblance to former NFL star T. J. Houshmandzadeh), attempted to set the record straight about the comments he made earlier this month.
“I appreciate the love and support that the NFL and the NFL guys are definitely giving flag football,” Doucette told TMZ. “I love the fact that they wanna play and that they wanna come out and compete. But at the end of the day, we want the same process that we’ve been having to play at. We have to try out, and so do they. I don’t want to be like they’re entitled because of their names to be able to just automatically be on the team, and that’s what it sounds like from the [perspective of the] flag football world.
“We are fans of these guys and like I said we love the fact that they wanna go out and win the gold medal and represent the country just like us. But we don’t want to be forgotten about, because we are the ones who helped this game get to where it’s at.”
Doucette started playing flag football in the Xavier University intramural league. Since then, he has become one of the biggest names in the sport. After leading the U.S. to the world title in 2022 (the competition takes place every two years), Doucette was named the MVP of the 2023 Americas Continental Championship after leading Team USA to a 7-0 record at the event.
Still, when flag football was announced as a 2028 Olympic sport, the public seemed to immediately start speculating which NFL players would represent the U.S. Quarterbacks Mahomes, former USC star and Chicago Bears rookie Caleb Williams, Jalen Hurts of the Philadelphia Eagles and Joe Burrow of the Cincinnati Bengals are among the numerous NFL stars who have expressed interest in possibly joining Team USA.
But, as Doucette pointed out to TMZ, “tackle football and flag football are two totally different games.”
“It’s not something that they’re just gonna walk on the field and think they’re gonna dominate,” he said. “This isn’t playing NBA and going to FIBA and the three-point line is changed and the goal-tending rule has changed. No, this is a totally different game.”
Doucette said that’s why he feels he’d have an edge over Mahomes and the others in a competition for a spot on the Olympic team.
“I could easily say, ‘Oh, I’m better in flag football’ because they’ve never played,” he said. “Now if they take the time and actually put in the work and everything else, they should be better than me. They’re in the NFL, they’re elite. But I don’t think the transition would be as quick, I don’t think they would take the game as serious as we do. I know we gonna play hard every down, I know we gonna compete every down.
“But we would love to play ‘em. It’s no knock upon those guys. I just believe in myself, I believe in my teammates and I believe in the flag football world.”
